I feel like I was very unproductive this weekend, but I was very busy none the less.
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| Preparing to be washed and sorted |
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Yes that is a teapot and I'll have you know my house
is covered the in the most beutiful blossoms |
It started out on Friday with going to a farm with Caren, where we got to pick tomatoes and Dahlias.
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| I love the white and green coloring |
Then Ben's parents and brother came over to the house for dinner. Ben's parents were especially happy because it was the first time they had ever been hosted by either of their sons for a nice dinner.
I made tamales and pork shoulder that I had in the crock pot for over 24 hours simmering over low heat.
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| It literally fell apart when I had Ben get it out of the crock pot. |
For dessert I made a
Walnut Honey Cake with Riesling Sabayon (check out the lovely Tartelette blog) and served it with berries and ice cream. It was a wonderful cake, but I managed to slice open my right index finger on a sharp point on my flour sifter, and then when I was cutting the label off the wine bottle to get to the cork, I sliced open my left hand. Ben's mother wanted to give me stitches (she's a nurse), but I found my super glue and after a few minutes of pressure, and two layers of glue, my hand stopped bleeding and is now healing right along. It did however prevent me from getting a picture of the cake so I plan on making it again this week.
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| Perfect fall weather (lets not ask how I got this picture of 17N) |
The next morning I went to my folks house so we could headed up to Petaluma to visit my grandmother Sue. They were out grabbing bagels when I got there so I tracked down the very lazy owners of my parents
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Athena, who is a 1 year old Maine Coon and softer then
an alpaca. She could not be bothered to greet me at the
door as she was lazing about, watching the bird feeder outside |
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Boo, who owns all the land she can see,
was looking at a spider outside the window
before giving me this bored look. |
The plan was to pick up my grandmother and go see the artwork she had entered in the Sanoma Harvest Fair. She won 2nd place in the farmscapes category and both 4th and 5th place for harvest scenery. I'm going to have to get my dad to send me the pictures he took of her paintings, because I could have spent hours walking around the art building, looking at all the photos in detail. Instead I was informed that if I did not hurry up we could not go see the livestock which was one of the other reasons we were there.
One of the cool things is that when we walked into the fair we got to see some babydoll sheep and a baby alpaca. Then after the art and some yummy fried zucchini my grandmother and I headed over to the sheep and bunny rabbits.
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| Lazy sheep |
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| Sheep trying to find lunch |
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| Yes, that is a bunny. He was soft as sin |
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| What you doin? |
My grandmother's biggest concern was whether or not the bunny rabbits were happy in their cages and it took 2 breeders and myself to explain to her that they were happy and not in those cages for very long.
She then asked me if I wanted one, because the breeders were selling some. I realized she was shopping around for my Christmas gift and immediately informed her that angoras usually went for around $200 at the low end, unless you could find them at a rabbit rescue. She was floored by this and I took her over to the breeder that was selling fiber. She got a second shock by the price of the angora tuffs you could buy (I refrained from getting some since I got some in my phat fiber box). We then had a conversation regarding what animals Ben and I planned on getting in the future (mainly dogs), and about the price of angora yarns we had seen at The Knitterly in downtown Petaluma (a favorite yarn shop of my grandmother's, my mom's and mine).
Then after a getting a wonderful bag of kettle corn (my dad's and my favorite fall tradition), we headed off to find pumpkins at
Adobe Pumpkin Farm.
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This little guy was very interested
in licking the sugar from the kettle
corn off my hand. |
There were few pumpkins as this summer has not been hot, but my grandmother scored this awesome bunny rabbit pillow from
R.U. Piper Designs at the
Farmer's Wife Barntique. I'm always on the lookout for rabbit stuff and when my grandmother saw it she knew I needed it, which I truly do.
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| His beret says Paris |
After we all parted I spent the rest of the night hanging out with Anna, and when my car got blocked in we decided that I should just stay the night. We stayed up watching The Patriot and looking through the new Interweave's Holiday Knits. We came to the conclusion that I need to do a special on it, because you can make many of the patterns with fingerling and lace weight yarn. So watch out for that later this week and till then I'm going to leave you with more pictures from the Harvest Fair.
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| Some colorful pumpkins |
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The fiber booth. There was very little
in the way of knits |
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| 2nd place winner for flower pots |
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| 1st place flower pot winner. |
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| Cute Dumpkins |
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| I think its a juicer... Still looks cools |
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| The pumpkin wagon looked fun and yummy with the potatoes under it |
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Squashes, gourds and pumpkins of
all shapes, colors and sizes |
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| We could not find the poisoned apples. Dad looked |
